Search results

This chapter reviews the institutional seasonality phenomenon in Asian outbound tourism. Eight key Asian countries were selected for investigation. Secondary data and archives from official tourism authorities and government reports are used as the information sources for the holiday systems and the celebrations for the cultural festivals. Four categories of holidays shaping the outbound seasonality patterns (universal holidays based on Gregorian calendar, Chinese culture-based holidays, religious festivals, and school holidays) are identified across the eight countries. Particular observances for those key cultural and religious holidays are highlighted. The opportunities and challenges for destination managers and tourism businesses to capitalize on and support peak outbound Asian seasonality are discussed.

This chapter sets out to explore consumer-centred experiential luxury from the perspective of a human body. We focus on the various practices related to a yoga retreat holiday experience in luxury hotel premises, such as encounters with hotel facilities, employees, nature and atmosphere besides yoga practice. Attention to bodily practices and affectivities on a yoga retreat holiday experience enables discussing intangible luxury beyond the traditional debate of luxury as related to product or brand features or experiential luxury focused only on the cognitive multisensory perceptions. The autoethnographic approach supports unwrapping the subtle affectual sensations building individual luxury in the experience setting. The data are gathered along with the first author's fieldwork during her three yoga retreat holidays in Thailand. The embodied investigation of tourist practices inducing luxury in the premises of a luxury hotel enriches the discussion of the co-creation between human bodies and the experience setting. It draws attention to the dynamic, situational and sensitive nature of luxury in the contemporary touristic experience of a yoga retreat holiday. It also advances the existing research on the body, practice and knowing by featuring the way luxury is emerging within the practice of yoga retreat holiday. By challenging the paradigm of luxury sensed only through our five external senses, our findings on the being, doing and moving body deepen the understanding of the co-creation and sensitiveness, affecting the subjective, transparent and embodied understanding of luxury experience.

This chapter aims to explore relationship between individual values and holiday preferences. Values as standards of assessing behaviors are often used in tourism research and have been connected to tourists’ behaviors and activities preferences. In this chapter, Schwartz Value Survey (Schwartz, 1992) was used to determine individual values. Holiday preferences were evaluated on a Likert scale using two separate lists: types of destination (e.g., seaside, city) and forms of holiday (e.g., local, short). Sample consisted of 120 university students in Serbia. Results show that there is a correlation between values and holiday preferences. Implications are further discussed in the chapter.

The anomalous patterns in foreign exchange markets have received relatively little attention in the literature. This paper empirically investigates the Day-of-the-Week effect in the yen-dollar currency market for three decades and confirms that such effect did exist for the period 1973–1989, but it disappears for the 1990s. The results remain unchanged when the business condition effect, the January effect, the holiday effect, and the first and last day of the month effect are controlled. The results suggest that financial deregulation in Japan has made foreign currency markets more efficient in recent years.

Children have the ability to contribute to sustainable tourism research. A great deal of research on nature holiday has been conducted. However, it is unclear how this travel might serve as a good motivator for children to engage in environmentally responsible behaviour. To address this research gap, 72 drawings of children aged nine to 12 from Tehran, Iran, accompanied with the stories of their holiday were collected. Thematic analysis was done to assess their experience in nature and their cognitive state of environmental responsible behaviour. According to the finding, children are significantly concerned about nature, and they mostly perceived their best holidays in the natural environment. Children displayed a profound awareness of environmental responsible behaviour themes through their encounters with nature. Their experiences are classified into five levels: sensory, emotive, cognitive, behavioural and relationship. Each of these stages of experience may be used as a guideline for encouraging and training youngsters to be responsible.

This paper investigates Japanese stock returns for the Friday, Monday and Tuesday surrounding U.S. Monday holiday closures. The empirical results show that U.S. Monday closures have a statistically significant impact on Japanese stock return dynamics for surrounding trading days, but do not support the hypothesis that the U.S. Monday and Japanese Tuesday effects are related. Potential explanations for the occurrence and then disappearance of the Japanese Tuesday effect rely on market microstructure properties unique to the Tokyo market. The spillover effects from New York to Tokyo have been increased in density over time, which is attributed to market structural changes represented by the introduction of Nikkei 225 index futures on the SIMEX in 1986.

This chapter simultaneously investigates the most important calendar anomalies in stock returns: day of the week, turn of the month, turn of the year and holiday periods, in four of the most important Latin American stock markets: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Chile. Previous evidence available for these countries is very limited. Our results indicate that the three markets show a rather similar pattern regarding return seasonality. A day of the week effect, consisting in negative returns on Mondays, is reported for all the stock markets but the Mexican. The turn of the year effect is observed only in Argentina, and moderate holiday and turn of the month effects are reported in the Brazilian and the Mexican markets, respectively. In addition, significant levels of first-order return autocorrelation are reported for the four stock markets. The contemporary financial crisis has dramatically affected the behaviour of stock prices worldwide, causing, among other effects, a huge increase in price volatility and probably changing the behaviour of participants in financial markets. We have also investigated to what extent our results have been affected by the current abnormal situation.

Cinco de Mayo celebrations have become more popular in the United States than in Mexico. In the past few decades, this historic day has changed from a regional celebration of Mexican American culture into nationwide Latino/a holiday hijacked by the alcohol industry and other commercial interests. This chapter closely examines the varied ways in which Cinco de Mayo has been represented by U.S. advertisers, marketers, and restaurant owners. Using content analysis of Cinco de Mayo advertisements in magazines, billboards, liquor ads, and store displays from 2000 to 2006, five mediated representations emerged: Mexico's Fourth of July, Mexican St. Patrick's Day, Drinko de Mayo, Sexism in a Bottle, and Mexican Otherness. These representations are anchored in a new racism ideology that emphasizes cultural difference, individualism, liberalism, and colorblindness, which reinforce existing racial inequalities. The implications of the alcohol industry's Cinco de Mayo advertisements is the increased targeting of Latino/a youth from working-class communities with high rates of alcohol-related violent deaths and illnesses.

This chapter investigates how holiday decisions for couples change when they become parents. By the use of a qualitative-explorative research approach (grounded theory method), 10 in-depth interviews were done with Dutch parents-to-be expecting their first child. The results show that emotional response ranks high in terms of the occurred changes, which originate from a set of interrelated consequences. A strong link with a deep fundamental basis rooted in daily life values can be made. Such roots oblige the tourism industry to consider product differentiation to serve this segment better and to capture a competitive position in the dynamic tourism industry.

What are the consequences of urban life in an ethno-nationally contested city? How do everyday practices confront municipal strategies that attempt to control such urban situations? Focusing on urban life in which daily negotiation of ethno-national differences occurs, this chapter considers the nuances of urban politics and the use and meaning of the urban space, i.e., the micro-politics and the social dynamic of place-making, and their role in the struggle for urban citizenship in an ethno-nationally mixed city. Discourse analysis and ethnographic encounters define the annual Holiday of Holidays festival in the Israeli–Palestinian neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas as integral to Haifa's strategy for promoting itself as a site of coexistence. The neighborhood serves the entire city in that its “Arab” urban space has become the emblem of that coexistence. This manipulation by the municipality is, however, not reinforced by urban regeneration and heritage management of the local Palestinian community. Nonetheless coexistence discourse is also employed by the residents themselves, suggesting a more nuanced understanding of the role of urban space in promoting the city, as well as of concepts of local identity and citizenship.